This book explores the impact of resource extraction and the dynamics of great powers competing for natural resources in the Caribbean. The book analyzes labour–capital relations between China, the United States, the European Union, and Russia in the Caribbean, as competition increases with the arrival of non-traditional sources of foreign investments in infrastructure from the East. Chapters assess these dynamics through varying historical and current forms of worker, community, and organization resistance in the Caribbean’s extractive industries from the 1970s to the present. In doing so, the book critically analyzes the interplay of extractive capital with labour unions, community organizations, management, and the state, particularly regarding the struggle for higher wages, improved working conditions, and the broader issues of extractive capitalism and underdevelopment, dispossession, social exclusion, and environmental degradation. The first book on extractivism and labour in the Caribbean and a major contribution to critical development studies literature, it will appeal to policymakers as well as students and scholars in the fields of development studies, development economics, sociology, politics, and international relations.

This book explores the impact of resource extraction and the dynamics of great powers competing for natural resources in the Caribbean. It is a major contribution to development studies literature, appealling to policymakers, students and scholars of Development Studies and Economics, Sociology, Politics, and International Relations.

Amid the growing calls for a turn towards sustainable agriculture, this book puts forth and discusses the concept of agrarian extractivism to help us identify and expose the predatory extractivist features of dominant agricultural development models. The concept goes beyond the more apparent features of monocultures and raw material exports to examine the inherent logic and underlying workings of a model based on the appropriation of an ever-growing range of commodified and non-commodified human and non-human nature in an extractivist fashion. Such a process erodes the autonomy of resourcedependent working people, dispossesses the rural poor, exhausts and expropriates nature, and concentrates value in a few hands as a result of the unquenchable drive for profit by big business. In many instances, such extractivist dynamics are subsidized and/or directly supported by the state, while also dependent on the unpaid, productive, and reproductive labour of women, children, and elders, exacerbating unequal class, gender, and generational relations. Rather than a one-size-fits-all definition of agrarian extractivism, this collection points to the diversity of extractivist features of corporate-led, external-input-dependent plantation agriculture across distinct socio-ecological formations in Latin America. This timely challenge to the destructive dominant models of agricultural development will interest scholars, activists, researchers, and students from across the fields of critical development studies, rural studies, environmental and sustainability studies, and Latin American studies, among others.

This book investigates how extractive capitalism has developed over the past three decades, what dynamics of resistance have been deployed to combat it, and whether extractivism can ever be transformed into being a part of a progressive development path. It was not until the 20th century that the extraction of natural resources and raw materials took on a decidedly capitalist form, with the global north extracting primary commodities from the global south as a means of capital accumulation. This book investigates whether extractivism, despite its well-documented negative and destructive socioenvironmental impacts and the powerful forces of resistance that it has generated, could ever be transformed into a sustainable post-development strategy. Drawing on diverse sectoral forms of extractivism (mining, fossil fuels, agriculture), this book analyses the dynamics of both the forces of resistance generated by the advance of extractive capital and alternate scenarios for a more sustainable and liveable future. The book draws particularly on the Latin American experience, where both the propensity of capitalism towards crisis and the development of resistance dynamics to ‘extractive’ capital have had their greatest impact in the neoliberal era. This book will be of interest to researchers and students across development studies, economics, political economy, environmental studies, Indigenous studies, and Latin American affairs.

The last two decades have witnessed a dramatic expansion and intensification of mineral resource exploitation and development across the global south, especially in Latin America. This shift has brought mining more visibly into global public debates and spurred a great deal of controversy and conflict. This volume assembles new scholarship that provides critical perspectives on these issues. The book marshals original, empirical work from leading social scientists in a variety of disciplines to address a range of questions about the practices of mining companies on the ground, the impacts of mining on host communities, and the responses to mining from communities, civil society and states. The book further explores the global and international causes, consequences and innovations of this new era of mining activity in Latin America. Key issues include the role of Canadian mining companies and their investment in the region, and, to a lesser extent, the role of Chinese mining capital. Several chapters take a regional perspective, while others are based on empirical data from specific countries including Bolivia, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala and Peru.

Taxation and Inequality in Latin America takes a heterodox political economy approach, focusing on Latin America, where current problems of taxation have existed for a century and great wealth contrasts with abject poverty. The book analyzes the relation of natural resource wealth, allocational politics and the limited role of taxation for redistribution, and progressive resource mobilization. By drawing on the political economy of tax regimes, the book considers the specific conditions of taxation in Latin America, which apply to a large part of the Global South and more than 100 countries specializing in the extraction and export of raw materials. This book will cover: taxation and the dominance of raw material export sectors; taxation and allocational politics; new perspectives on political economy and tax regimes. Scholars and advanced students of political economy, political science, development studies, and fiscal sociology will find several key issues in tax research from a novel angle. The book provides an analytical orientation that relates central questions of taxation to patterns of regional political economy, thereby opening up the debate with tax scholars from other world regions of the Global South.

Through the twin themes of the environment and development, Brad D. Jokisch introduces students to the regions of Latin American and the Caribbean through a concise, comprehensive, and cohesive overview. Designed for courses in either geography or Latin American Studies, this text covers the physical geography, environmental hazards, and a concise history of the region, along with treatment of economic issues—including China’s role—urbanization, population trends, and international migration. Regional chapters on Brazil, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, the Andes, and the Southern Cone ensure that students understand the distinct areas of Latin America as well as the region as a whole. Key features include: Extensive maps, figures, and tables to help students visualize the material Chapter opening learning objectives and key terms lists to help organize important concepts End-of-chapter conclusions and summary points and a glossary to aid in studying Excellent treatment of current research from geography and across the social sciences to reinforce the state of the field A key case study chapter on Amazonian deforestation and development In-depth analysis of the commodity boom, the Pink Tide, the rise of China, certification programs, and the illicit drug trade

This dynamic Companion explores the connections - and disconnections - between migration and sustainable development as articulated by the UN’s Agenda 2030 and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Providing a critical appraisal of Agenda 2030, it examines the extent to which the SDGs encompass migration and migrant-related experiences within the context of the pledge to ‘leave no-one behind’.

This book assesses the political, economic and geopolitical dynamics that China’s presence has initiated throughout Latin America and the Caribbean between 2008 and 2020. Written by experts across three continents, contributions to this edited volume explore the bilateral relations that China has developed with almost all Latin American and Caribbean countries, charting both the benefits they have brought and the problems that these relations have created for local actors. The book analyses the emergence of new forms of "dependence", considers issues such as the existence of a deindustrialization phenomenon throughout Latin America and ultimately questions whether China and the United States are engaged in a zero-sum game in the region. It also investigates challenges that the densification of the web of China’s relations and exchanges with Latin America and the Caribbean countries pose; not only to the United States and European countries, as traditional partners of these states, but also to Latin American regionalism. Including an extensive set of case studies and local, regional and global-level analysis, China-Latin America and the Caribbean provides an empirically rich resource for students and scholars of Chinese foreign and economic policy, Latin America, the Caribbean and wider geopolitics.

This ground-breaking Handbook broadens empirical and theoretical understandings of work, work relations, and workers. It advances a global, intersectional labour studies agenda, laying the foundations for the politically emancipatory project of decolonising the political economy of work.